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Home » Brain cancer, Medical Research

‘Awesome’ Blood Test Reveals Earliest Brain Tumors

Submitted by MedHeadlines on November 23, 2008 – 11:55 pm7 Comments
 

Using current medical technologies, doctors must rely on biopsies or visual image scanning, such as x-ray, MRI, and PET, to diagnose glioblastoma, the form of brain tumor for which US Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) has been treated recently.  Biopsies, which reveal genetic data, require brain surgery and scanning procedures usually can’t detect these brain tumors until they are too advanced for treatment.  Now, however, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital say they’ve discovered a way to use blood samples for brain tumor detection and they’ve been able to do so even when biopsies revealed no tumors.  And they describe this discovery as a positively “Wow” moment.

Another exciting finding associated with the study is the previously unknown way these particular brain tumor cells seem to cozy up into their environment, nesting, if you will, with neighboring cells.  By giving off tiny microvesicles, sacs enclosed in membrane, glioblastoma cells bond with healthy brain cells nearby and somehow alter them at the genetic level.  Once united, the microvesicles entice healthy brain cells to grow new blood vessels to feed the tumor.

In a ground-breaking discovery, the research team, led by Xandra Breakefield and John Skog, was able to detect these microvesicles, positive evidence of malignant brain tumor, in the blood samples from the biopsies.  In some cases, blood tests revealed glioma when biopsies were negative.

Breakefield describes the spread of microvesicles as a budding process, during which a microvesicle attaches itself to a healthy (host) cell and relays genetic information that alters the host’s protein production so that it grows a shared blood supply with the cancerous cells.  She also suggests they do so with a vengeance, secreting such an abundant supply of microvesicles that the excess spills over into the blood supply.

Upon examination of the vesicles’ RNA and protein content, Breakefield and colleagues discovered a glimpse of genetic activity within the tumor itself, somewhat like a snapshot into the center of the cancer at that particular moment in time.  One particular mutation, EGFRvIII, affects a growth factor receptor.  It is this biomarker that signals the presence of glioblastoma.

Skog studied biopsies from 30 suspected glioblastoma cases, of which he diagnosed 14 as positive for EGFRvIII, signaling brain cancer.  Blood analysis formed the second round of tests for the 30 biopsies and it came with shocking results.  Blood analysis of two biopsies said to be free of all signs of glioma actually  tested positive, instead, for presence of the EGFRvIII mutation, thereby identifying the presence of brain cancer before any other symptoms were apparent to patient or physician, a finding described by Dr. Paul Graham Fisher, a Stanford University neuro-oncologist, as “Hot darn, that’s just incredible.”

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